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An anonymous reader writes with news of an interesting demo for clmtrackr (a Javascript library for tracking of facial features) that hides your face using 3D masks overlayed on the video from your webcam using WebGL. The effect is kind of neat, and a bit creepy. The demo works in Chromium here, but not in Firefox (Debian unstable). There are a couple other demos; the facial deformation demo is reminiscent of the intro screen to Mario 64.

So how should the browser send a drag event to the server? The only pointer events I know of that can be sent to the server without JavaScript are click events on server-side image maps, not drag events. How, for example, would you make a browser-based paint program without JS?

I think the simple answer is, why do you need a browser based paint program? Because you can is a good reason, but are there any other reasons. You could just as easily build a pain program using more traditional methods, and if you need to communicate with a server, you can just send stuff to the server, using HTTP if you like. There's very little reason to actually have the program running in the browser.

Who has to "install" a program. You can download an EXE and run it without installing it. This part of the reason that Google Chrome got so popular so fast. You didn't have to install anything. It didn't require administrator access. Very few machines are locked down so much that you can't run arbitrary EXEs. Just about any system I've ever used would let you run whichever executable you wanted. Now, if you wanted to write files outside your home directory, or open up listening ports, that's a whole oth

You can download an EXE and run it without installing it. [...] Very few machines are locked down so much that you can't run arbitrary EXEs. [...] I don't think I've ever used a system where an arbitrary exe (not counting specific viruses) weren't allowed to run.

You can't download and run an EXE on OS X, X11/Linux, Android, iOS, Windows RT, Windows Phone, Xbox, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Nintendo 3DS, or Wii U. Well you can run some EXEs on X11/Linux if you use Wine, as I do on my Xubuntu laptop, but that's an edge case. Besides, even on (recent) Windows, the operating system's SmartScreen feature will warn the user and encourage the user to delete an EXE if the EXE is "not commonly downloaded".

Well, it may not have an EXE extension, but in Linux and OSX, you can surely download a file, set the executable bit, and execute the program. There might be Linux and OSX configurations where the user does not have the right to set the executable bit, but again, it's not the norm. IOS, Android, and WinRT all allow programs to be download and run from the appropriate app store, and I can't see why you wouldn't want to just put an app on the apps store but would rather try to coerce a browser to do somethi

Well, it may not have an EXE extension, but in Linux and OSX, you can surely download a file, set the executable bit, and execute the program.

By "EXE" I did not intend to refer to a particular filename suffix. I intended to refer to an executable program in COFF/PE format that uses Windows APIs. An EXE won't run in Linux or OS X. Instead, the application would have to be ported to Linux and ported to OS X.

IOS, Android, and WinRT all allow programs to be download and run from the appropriate app store

I don't know, but as far as I've seen, putting scripting abilities, and other programming provisions, in browsers has lead to way more security problems than allowing people to run arbitrary executables. At least when I run arbitrary executables I get to decide which ones to run. They are downloaded to my computer, which can then run virus scans on them. Compare that to browser run code, where a small hole in the sandbox can lead to a users computer running all sorts of things, just from visiting a webp

serverside is too late. you DON'T want the server to get your "real" face. the business owning the server has no interest in spending buckets of cash to capture images of your real face, only to screw them up so you can have your precious privacy.

As predicted by John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar ): a video system where your face is superimposed on the screen, showing you visiting exotic locations, participating in dramas, etc, etc?

The demo worked fine for me, but completely failed to find my black partner's face, preferring instead a spot on the wall behind them. Obviously this isn't a professional product, but it's disappointing that simply locating a black person's face is still a missing feature in 2014.

Dark faces are challenging unless using projected IR light(a la night vision) due to these things usually relying on contrast to locate the nostrils, eyes and mouth. Basically, the closer the skin tone is to the iris and nostrils, the higher video fidelity and lighting quality needed to differentiate the two. It isn't a racism thing and can be worked around with better lighting or a better camera if IR isn't an option.

To expand on this, this behaviour is also seen on some cellphone unlocks and even the Kinect/Natal units had a hard time originally. The new Kinect much less so since it has a variety of other bits of biometric data with which to base itself.

'Real-time' usually seems to mean to a lot of people 'you don't have to do a processing step after saving data to see results, but instead see a stream as the data is collected'. 'Real-time' doesn't require that the system have no lag (impossible), but at least latency should be known. Which, I will grant you, is likely not known in this case.